1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system including a server which supports printing functions using a logical printer, which pre-registers physical, printers to which outputs are delivered and sets various print instruction information. In particular, the present invention relates to a printing system and a print control method which allow the print instructions specified by a printer driver to be reflected on print job attributes of the logical printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a concept called a logical printer is suggested in printing systems.
This logical printer is utilized such that, information a user wishes to make a print instruction is previously described in the logical printer, and when the user instructs printing, the information previously instructed to the logical printer is applied.
For example, when a Letter Logical Printer is created, data is outputted on letter-size paper even if the user specifies other sizes of paper.
This is caused because of the following. Different from default values for a document set to a printer driver, plural logical printers (plural kinds of settings) can be created for one physical printer and, while setting information of the printer driver depend on a user environment, in the case of the logical printer, since the setting is made onto the printer side, it is possible to set it from anywhere without depending on the user environment. In the case of specifying by the printer driver, when a different setting is needed, it is required to select a detailed setting for printing, or for some of the applications, a special setting cannot be set if a detailed print setting screen of the printing cannot be displayed. However, in the case of the logical printer, it is possible to apply a detailed setting to an output destination printer by changing the logical printer set as the output destination.
When the above-described logical printer is used for printing, information specifying the number of prints can be set previously in the logical printer or values specified by the print driver can be used as they are.
Specifically, when the number sets of prints is set as eight in the logical printer, it is possible to print eight sets of prints even when the number of sets of prints is set as three in the printer driver. Alternatively, when the number of sets of prints is not set in the logical printer, the number of sets of prints set in the printer driver, that is, in this example, three sets of prints are printed out.
Meantime, in a printing system using a server that supports a distributed output function, which has been provided recently, the following inconveniences occur.
Specifically, when an automatic print number division is set by a distribution output method and information specifying the number of prints is previously set in the logical printer, it is possible to appropriately divide the number of prints and to distribute a job to multiple printers. However, once such information is specified by the print driver, it is impossible to perform the divided output appropriately.
The reason for this is that the information specified by the printer driver depends on the PDL (Printer Description Language), and thus the contents of a print instruction specified by a user are unknown until a printer decomposes the PDL.
Further, in the conventional technique, it is also impossible to cope with a proof printing function, which is a function to output one set of prints before printing plural numbers of sets of prints to check whether or not the output condition and the setting of printing instruction are appropriate.
Specifically, when a user instructs a proof printing, that is, the user makes a print instruction to perform the proof printing with one set of prints for several times and thereafter perform printing of the rest of the number of sets of prints, it is impossible to perform the printing of “the number of sets of prints that the user first specified−(minus) one set of prints”, that is, the rest of the number of sets of prints to be printed.
As describe above, the conventional printing system did not have a means by which a print instruction specified by a printer driver of a client terminal can be reflected on print job attributes of a logical printer.